Morris Dickstein (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His books include Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960's, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award...

Presents essays addressing a range of literary, historical, and moral issues, covering the joys of literature in the works of such writers as Leo Tolstoy, Saul Bellow, and Sylvia Plath, as well as the author's early literary endeavors.

The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects contains some of Edmund Wilson's most significant and brilliant writings on topics and authors ranging from Pushkin, A. E. Housman, Flaubert, Henry James, Marxism, poetry and more.

The Nobel Prize—winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire...

Published in 1931, Axel's Castle was Edmund Wilson's first book of literary criticism-a landmark book that explores the evolution of the French Symbolist movement and considers its influence on six major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. As Alfred Kazin later wrote, "Wilson was an original, an extraordinary literary artist ... He could turn any literary subject...

In Soundings in Critical Theory, Dominick LaCapra continues his attempt to fashion a historiography that is at once critical and self-critical-a project he initiated in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (1983); and History and Criticism (1985), both available from Cornell University Press. This new collection of essays offers a provocative assessment of the nature of historical understanding and the role of critical theory...

In this collection of essays and epigrams, E.M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations-which he calls "admirations"-of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Mircea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms-his "anathemas"-he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, mortality, God, and the lure of disillusion.

The occult was a crucial influence on the Renaissance, and it obsessed the popular thinkers of the day. But with the Age of Reason, occultism was sidelined; only charlatans found any use for it. Occult ideas did not disappear, however, but rather went underground. It developed into a fruitful source of inspiration for many important artists. Works of brilliance, sometimes even of genius, were produced under its influence. In A Dark Muse, Lachman discusses...

"[A] collection of essays on writers, place, poetry, and photography--with accompanying photos throughout."